If you don't like our intellectual-property laws, write a letter to Congress. If you don't like Sony, don't buy its products. And if you just enjoy hampering other people's attempts to get some enjoyment out of life—because that's what it looks like when you harm consumers to get at a company—well, then, go to hell.

Status: Outrageous.

Prey 2: Conventional Shooter?

Prey was, like Duke Nukem Forever, one of those games that 3D Realms thought should be perfect—and, as a result, spent far too long finishing up. The thing was announced in 1995 and released in 2006. The portal gameplay would have been awesome if it hadn't been overshadowed so quickly by, well, Portal (which came out the following year). In a weird twist, so much time passed between the announcement of Prey and the inception of Portal that the young creators of Portal could say—not implausibly—that they didn't steal the idea, because they'd never heard about Prey when they started work on the project that later became Portal.

However, Prey's gravity-manipulation puzzles were clever even when the game finally hit shelves, and the host of the crazy alien-themed radio show Coast to Coast AM recorded all the in-game radio parts, so the franchise really deserves a second chance. But why would it lose the portals and gravity manipulation from its gameplay, as the developers announced it would last week? What else does it even have?

To be sure, it can be kind of ridiculous when game franchises go out of their way to come up with new stories that just happen to play into the same game mechanics. The plot to Portal 2 is basically, "Oh, and by the way, the funny robot survived, and now the original protagonist is in the exact same situation again."

But there's also a reason that developers do this: Game mechanics are part of a franchise's identity. Prey without portals and gravity manipulation isn't Prey, even if the excuse for these things in the first game—The Sphere—is gone. And while we can all hope for storytelling in games to improve, the bottom line is that it's better to suffer through a lame story to enjoy great gameplay than vice-versa.

So far as I can tell, this news is genuine, so I really should mark it Outrageous. But it came out on April Fool's Day, and I'm holding out hope, so . . .

Status: Unconfirmed.

By
Robert VerBruggenCCC
Freelance Writer

*The views expressed within this article are solely the opinion of the author and do not express the views held by Cheat Code Central.*